A critical review of local and world news. This blog originally commented on the Moncton Times and Transcript but has enlarged its scope.

Wednesday, October 4, 2017

Oct. 4: The news ain't good.

In general, the history of the last seventy years or so is that the U.S. government, pushed by its business leaders, wants to conquer the world. The purpose is to conquer the world - for the benefit of those business leaders. There's really nothing new about it. This has been the history of the world for thousands of years.

The history of the last two thousand years has been one of murdering and enslaving native peoples all over the world, then sending Christian missionaries - not to the savage and murderous Christian business leaders, but to their victims!!!???

That's why western 'explorers' slaughtered the native peoples of the Americas, to give western capitalists control of all that land and resources. That's why they enslaved the natives of Africa then, in even more brutal acts, slaughtered millions of Africans to steal their resources with a ferocity and greed that is still evident. That's why the British and French and Portuguese and Spanish and Americans murdered people with guns and hunger all over the world. That's what world wars one and two were really about.

That's why the Russians and Chinese were evil, we were told, because they were communists. But now that they're capitalist, they're still evil. Why? Because evil was never what it was about. It's all been about the greed of our major, business leaders, with the Canadian business leaders alongside the American ones for the ride as they were once along with the British Empire business leaders.

(Eventually, it is likely the Canadian business leaders will learn that they are disposable. Alas, it is quite possible that all Canadians will experience that.)

The terrible price for all this greed was paid for by the conquered people - and by the ordinary people of the conquering lands who suffered the most on our side, and who got the least out of it as the wealthy gorged themselves on stolen lands and mines and other resources. Thus the current Trumpian urge to invade Venezuela. And, not surprisingly, his support comes heavily from the American Bible belt. And his cabinet basks in prayers to God as it plans its next brutality.

(Here, I should make my views clear. I have no interest whatever in beliefs in heaven or hell or salvation or miracles. I'll let you know if that changes after I die. The core of the message of Jesus, a core to be found in most religions, is about our behaviour here on earth. On that basis, the record of Christians over the last 2000 years has not been impressive.)

Though I'm sure they say prayers before board meetings, there is nothing Christian about our major business leaders. Quite the opposite, they thrive on greed, indifference to human need, and that old companion of power and privilege - a sense of sneering, social superiority.

Can U.S. business leaders conquer the world? Probably not. All of its wars have been against nations smaller, poorer, and weaker than the U.S. And its record since 1945 has not been impressive. Nor is that surprising for the American people themselves showed in the Vietnam war that they were not interested in long, grinding wars. And that is why, to this day, the U.S. army depends heavily on hired mercenaries, a high proportion of them foreigners.

Since 1945, the U.S. has been far the most aggressive nation in the world. But its record is weak. Its economic foundations are deeply sunk in corruption. Its dollar has a shaky future. And it cannot possibly conquer the world without loosing nuclear destruction that would destroy the world.

One conclusion to draw from all this is that our "superior" class of big money is not very bright. It thinks in the short term. It thinks only of itself. And this is the class that owns most of our politicians.

But don't worry. Just get sprinkled with holy water, and you'll get in front of the line to heaven.
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Trump is, of course, a moron. What he has is a sense of popular resentments, and playing on those. But, in any case, moron presidents are not unusual. Nor are murderous presidents, or sell-outs to big business. In those categories one could easily place men like Trump, Truman, George Bush junior, Bill Clinton....

In any case, looney-tune presidents is what you can expect to get in a nation whose only news is propaganda, most of it put out by the same very wealthy people who own the politicians. So we live in an invented world in which anybody on our side is 'good'; anybody on the other side is 'evil'; Syrians, for example, use evil, chemical weapons. Yes. But Americans never do. Oh, no!

Most commercial news is designed to generate hatreds and fears - and myths about our innocence and goodness.

Netflix has a documentary about the rise of Adolf Hitler that is eerily reminiscent of the rise of Trump.

The next item is about schooling in Britain. But it's equally true of schooling in most countries. Our children do NOT have equal opportunities. That's why many of our political leaders are NOT particularly intelligent and, more markedly, why so many of our very wealthy are not intelligent at all.

The social class that a child is born into is a powerful influence - powerful in the standards it encourages (or doesn't encourage), in the expectancies it creates. We have a marked tendency to encourage the rich and to discourage the poor. The result is that we often produce rich morons produced by private schools who go on to become leaders, and poor but intelligent children who go on to lives of menial work.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/oct/02/meritocracy-myth-reforming-education-uk-schools
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And here's a story about those awful Puerto Ricans who are bad-mouthing Donald Trump.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/03/hurricane-maria-dominica-recovery
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Here's one of many stories that wasn't important enough to make the irving press.

The next one will make me enemies. But it's one that our press will never talk about. The behaviour of Israel toward Palestinians has been shameful. It is being done with massive support by the U.S. and, frankly, it closely resembles Hitler's treatment of Jews. Indeed, like Hitler's racism, it is based on racist views of both Jews and Palestinians.

A so-called 'Israeli lobby' exists in Europe, the U.S., Canada to exploit our feelings of guilt over Hitler's holocaust to justify hatred and murder of Palestinians (who had nothing to do with the holocaust or with anti-semitism. That was entirely the work of Christians all over the western world.) In my later days on radio and in public speaking, I saw the growing influence of the Israeli lobby in the news we were being permitted to hear. That lobby has done much to destroy the Jewish community that I knew.)

For almost seventy years, the small and relatively poor nation of North Korea has suffered daily provocations by U.S. forces, and has been crushed under trade sanctions that keep it poor. It also faces the constant threat, repeated recently by the U.S. president, to nuke the country with some of the U.S.'s 7,000 nuclear missiles.

The North American press routinely portrays leader Kim Jong-un as disgusting and even comic. And he's dangerous for developing a nuclear bomb. (But the U.S. isn't dangerous for having 7,000 of the things). Kim Jung is certainly a dictator. (But the U.S. isn't all that red hot as a democracy.)

But what would you do if the U.S. had been threatening your country every day for seventy years? That's a question never asked by our propaganda press.
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Ken Burns' film about the Vietnam war has been widely praised. I thought it had good points - but was way off base in excusing it as a case of good Americanism that got lost. In fact it was a war of extraordinary and deliberate brutality that was fought to extend the American empire for American billionaires.

Trump's threats to nuke North Korea, if acted on, could, very likely, lead to a world nuclear war. It's worth thinking twice about this one.

http://rabble.ca/news/2017/10/reckless-provocation%E2%80%99-diplomacy-only-rational-solution-north-korea-says-historian-luc
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One of the critical issues our society has to deal with - and soon - is the way we have allowed the very wealthy to hide trillions of dollars from taxation. Trudeau's attack on small business as the villains is absurd. But Trudeau knows who his masters are.

But small business owners are still suckers enough to support the chamber of commerce and to clap hands for the billionaires who are ripping them off.
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https://www.nationalobserver.com/2017/10/02/analysis/how-reporters-historic-canadian-journalism-collaboration-cornered-silent-killer
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Remember about a decade ago when illegal practices put the big banks in the U.S. in danger of collapse? The executives should have gone to jail. But they didn't. No. Congress spent a vast fortune of borrowed money so those criminals could stay in power, and even get multi-millionaire dollar bonuses for what they did.

The news from the far east is always scanty. Then there's the problem that the news we do get isn't what it seems to be. There is some evidence that a we are being propagandized into a war which is not what it may seem to be about.

Fans of Agatha Christie's novels will be familiar with one of her crime solvers, Miss Marple. She lived in a remote, English village, and could solve crimes with ease. She could do so, she explained, because in a village one gets to know people well, and all people, even criminals, behave in much the same way and for very much the same reasons. The same is true with ruling classes.

The earliest aristocrats of England rose to power by their military ability. Accordingly, they saw themselves as superior to others, and thus born to rule. The same was true of kings and queens.

They assumed that their children, especially their eldest sons, would inherit their skills of leadership. Alas! That frequently proved wrong as the second, third, and later generations often displayed, at best, ordinary talent or even drooling idiocy.
Nonetheless, these generations continued to rule, to lead armies even as they dithered into incompetence. Thus the rise of an officer named Baden-Powell who became a hero to the people for his defence of Mafeking in South Africa.

In fact, he was not a hero to his superior commanders. He wasn't supposed to be defending Mafeking in the first place - but it was too late. He was a popular hero, and had to be promoted and also made a lord. Similarly, there was the uncaring aristocrat who led his troops into : "The Charge of the Light Brigade". It was an absurd attack into cannon fire that slaughtered his troops. The officer simply left them dying on the field while he returned to his yacht for supper. And there was General Gordon whose whole command was killed when he decided to defend a city that he had been ordered to evacuate. The Supreme British commander of World War 1 spent his post-war years erasing his war diaries because they revealed so many decisions that proved to be terrible.

The British kings? It becomes hard to find an even passably intelligent one in the last 500 years or so. The House of Windsor has been lucky with Elizabeth who at least knows when to keep her head down. More commonly, it has been a family of remarkably low intelligence.

And so it has been throughout history. The emperors and aristocrats of early Rome became the frivolous spendthrifts who destroyed the Roman people and the empire by their own self-serving greed.

The billionaires by inheritance with their very expensive schools and their social pretensions and sense of privilege are the Baden-Powells and Gordons and Edward VIIIs of our time. And, like their predecessors, they are doing enormous damage.

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About Me

born into poverty in Montreal. (1933 was a bad year to be born.) Kicked out of school in grade 11. Became factory hand, office boy.
Did a general BA, mostly at night at Sir George Williams University, and partly while a youth worker for YMCA, camps, etc. Then teacher training at McGill.
Taught gradea 7 to 11 for six years. Loved it.
Quit to do MA at Acadia, then PhD (History) at Queen's.
Taught history three years at UPEI, then some 35 years at Concordia U in Montreal.
Loved the teaching. Thought the profs had more pompous and useless asses among then than is really desirable outside a zoo.
work experience:
factory, office,social group work, office,camp director, teacher.
Radio - c. 3000 broadcasts, mostly current events.
TV - many hundred appearances, mostly commentaries.
Film - some writing, advising, voice-overs.
Writing - no count, some hundreds. Some academic, but mostly for popular market, and ranging from short stories to stories to newspaper and magazine columns to history books.
professional speaker - close to 2000.
Awards for the above? yep